International Journal of Communication 10(2016), Book Review 41664172

19328036/2016BKR0009

Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press, 2016; 224 pp.; $69.95 (hardcover), $24.95 (paperback and Kindle).
Reviewed by
Lisa Henderson
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA
In early fall of 2014, I left the first session of my lecture
course on media and culture and walked into the clear afternoon with
a

new

student

whom Ill

call

Michael.

Michael

came

from

Springfield, Massachusetts, down the road from the University of

Massachusetts flagship campus in Amherst, where I teach. Michael
was friendly and curious, and took the opportunity to introduce
himself and talk to me about my provocations on our first day of
class. He was a little older than most college students, he told me,
was concerned not to waste time and opportunity at the university,
and was committed to media studiesmy fieldto build his brand
as a deejay and hip-hop radio host. Michael is White, hails from a
working-class family that had spent many generations in Springfield,
and imagines himself at a disadvantage, relative to young people
from wealthier backgrounds whose parents had attended college. His
had not.
Michaels reference to his brand took me by surprise. I asked him to tell me about it, and as he
described his ambitions and his distinction among area deejays, I recognized brand, in his sense, as
closely akin to identity in mine. They were not the same, but the recognition reined in my knee-jerk
reaction to the idea of a young person with a brand. Couldnt he come to college, I silently thought, to
learn new things, meet new people, experiment, cultivate a critical perspective, and give himself a break
in the brand development department rather than relentlessly imagining his future in commercial terms?
In other words, couldnt he attend college as I had, over 35 years earlier, in Canada, where tuition had
cost $264 per semester?
In a word, no. Michael wanted a creative life and had no time to waste. Hed have to hustle, he
told mehe knew that. Conversation was something he was making a habit of doingintroducing himself
to all his teachers, seeking a little recognition in the sea of 300 undergraduate faces, an increasing
proportion of whom came from out of state, as the University of Massachusetts, like virtually every other
state institution, cultivates out-of-state enrollment as a revenue source.
Springfield is near and yet far. Michael probably did not have the cultural advantages that, say,
Amherst High School kids, more of whose parents had gone to college, had. Michael wanted to stay in the
conversation with his teachers, he told me, because hopefully we would want to help him after he
graduated. He wanted to do things right. If he was going to take on debt, he at least wanted to be sure
he got what he came for. I do not know what Michaels financial aid eligibility was, but through whatever
Copyright 2016 (Lisa Henderson, lhender@comm.umass.edu). Licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd). Available at http://ijoc.org.

International Journal of Communication 10(2016), Book Review

Lisa Henderson 4167

combination of means, he would need to assemble about US$30,000 per academic year (for tuition, fees,
residence, meals, books, health insurance, and related expenses) as an in-state student.
For my part, I was worried that Michael wanted something our research-based, academic
program in Communication wouldnt provide: media industries training. Although I and others in my
department have long supported a critical production curriculum, we are, first, a social science department
with a small but growing complement of skills courses in media making, a complement paired with other
forms of applied instruction in writing, public speaking, research methods, community service learning,
and mediation. Beyond our range of studio courses, we recommend internships for training in media,
community development, state government, and marketing, alongside students academic preparation on
campus. We have a terrific range and rate of success with local and international internship placements, I
told Michael, and I encouraged him to pay close attention to the internship search assignment he would
encounter in his Introduction to the Major course as a first-year student. Michael hoped to find paid
internships while he cultivated his art and deejay profile in his off-hours. He was in no position to compete
for unpaid work during the school year or the summer.
Michaels story is not unusual among current state university newcomers, but I return to it
inspired by feminist cultural studies scholar Angela McRobbies Be Creative: Making a Living in the New
Culture Industries. McRobbie has studied contemporary cultural forms for over 35 years, from club and
rave cultures to independent fashion, always through a composite lens of feminist theory and the British
left tradition of cultural studies. Be Creative takes on a deeply ambivalent object for many of us who share
McRobbies commitments: the formation of creative economies in the neoliberal era (dating from the late
1970s), in McRobbies case in the UK between the election of Tony Blair in 1997 and the financial crash in
2008the crest of New Labour and labor reform. On the one hand, the prominence of culture in the moral
and economic life of community and country is welcome; on the other, the terms of recognition are
twisted by economic agendas at odds (1) with the ambition of an egalitarian, participatory context for
policy and government investment and (2) with the deployment of cultural resources for democratic
purposes, what Hesmondhalgh, Oakley, Lee, and Nesbitt (2015) call cultural democracy (p. 33).
Although situated in the United States, Michaels story is typical of what McRobbie describes in
the UK, where most of her examples come from women in the fashion trade: Michael is young; he aspires
to an expressive, artistic life in contrast to his parents blue-collar employment in postindustrial western
Massachusetts; he has no safety net save his willingness to self-exploit in the name of hustling, going for
it, and passionate work (McRobbie, p. 36); and he envisions his success as a rise up and out, not
anchored by a set of attachments in and around a community, tradition, or collective. He is prepared to
work hard toward a life that combines art and commerce, neither art as special precinct nor a job in the
traditional sense, and not marked by any expectation of security from employer or government. The
university is his training ground for a creative future, not a space of reflection or anti-instrumental
education, and universities themselves are eager to control the training market. The situation McRobbie
describes at her institution, Goldsmiths University London, with its myriad pay-as-you-go masters
programs in event planning and promotion, for example, is ahead of the University of Massachusetts
Amherst in this effort, although there, too, marketized training programs in such areas as media literacy
are in development. Everywhere, new revenue-generating efforts are redoubled by market-style

4168 Lisa Henderson

International Journal of Communication 10(2016), Book Review

competition among institutions, especially as state allocations have been slashed and repackaged as
competitive resources.
McRobbie anchors her analysis in what she refers to, following Foucault, as the creativity
dispositif, an array of policies, personal and institutional practices, world views, aspirations, and even
physical dispositions that congeal as a set of normsnorms encouraging legions of young people to enter
a thrilling and precarious risk economy. There is boundless evidence that creative economy work is low
paidin fashion, music, filmmaking, visual art, or performanceexcept at the very top, but that does not
temper the enthusiasm of newcomers. Nor does the rank insecurity of knowing that any pay lasts only as
long as the current job. Given the prevalence of short-term, part-time schemes in the creative economy,
the solution becomes holding down three or four jobs at a time. McRobbie quotes a journalist about the
London fashion sector: Once youve tried doing four jobs, youll never want anything less (p. 27).
Such a breathless speed-up, McRobbies citations document, is at the root of all manner of
psychopathology, from depression to addiction. It is equally at the root of a broad process of
depoliticization. Although creative economy workers below the top do not expect jobs to last or
governments to provide even stop-gap measures when jobs fail, they believe they have only themselves
to blametheir inadequacies of personality, drive, or entrepreneurial strategywhen they cannot sustain
themselves or their careers. Gina Neff (2012) makes a similar point in Venture Labor: Work and the
Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries, whose digital content and platform producers in New Yorks
Silicon Alley blamed themselves for losses and bad risks despite a risk-driven economy whose bottom
fell out in 2001. In the UK, there is no workplace politics, argues McRobbie, because there is no
workplace, just a highly individuated set of freelance pathways and informal networks that exclude as
much as they connect. They especially exclude mothers, who are unavailable for the relentless social
mixing the sector requires, as it parlays club and rave culture into professional scene-making, from clubs
to hubs (p. 28) and again into companies (chapter 1) in McRobbies analysis. In both the imaginations of
creative economy workers and the policy dossiers of New Labour, says McRobbie, celebratory creativity
has displaced work. It is enough to make a left critic reminisce about the shop floor, its culture of
solidarity and collective bargaining, and its provision of a lifetime of employment and security (prior to
Thatcherite retrenchment), even if the work itself was enervating or dangerous and the security barebones. One cohorts nightmare of shop floor work occludes anothers recollection of social forms worth
remembering.
The fast-moving train that is the creative economyor at least the language of the creative
economymirrors the rhetoric of urban development guru Richard Florida, a figure for whom McRobbie
(among others) reserves a particularly sharp critique (pp. 4550). Once at George Mason University and
then Carnegie Mellon, Florida is now senior editor at The Atlantic and director of the Martin Prosperity
Institute at the University of Toronto (locally nicknamed the Disparity Institute). Since Floridas (2002)
publication of The Rise of the Creative Class: And How Its Transforming Work, Community, and Everyday
Life, followed by multiple editions and sequels, Florida has advised municipal governments internationally
to shape policy priorities to attract and retain members of the so-called creative classknowledge
workers and the leisure and cultural sectors they desire. Underpinning Floridas program is the Silicon
Valley model of high-tech start-ups and its enrichment effect on the Bay Area (McRobbie, p. 48). It is a

International Journal of Communication 10(2016), Book Review

Lisa Henderson 4169

model to be replicated elsewhere, a breezy business school discourse and how-to promotional campaign
that has, strangely, achieved the status of doctrine in many places and political formations. A new
agenda for urban policy, McRobbie writes, enters into society through an upbeat, think-positive, selfconsciously funky fast-fix ethos, with the help of a vocabulary directly imported from marketing and
public relations (p. 48). Floridas program has its apparent upside: Well-heeled creative-class types prefer
their neighborhoods mixed (just not economically), which means there is a place, say, for ethnic food and
gay culture and an urban embrace of commercial tolerance (again, just not economic or class tolerance).
But Bay Area development has acquired a generation of critics and opponents as the region has
priced itself beyond even highly paid knowledge sector denizens. For many, it is gentrification run amok,
to be responded to with aggression, denunciation, and organized protest. Florida has answered with
initiatives that postdate without challenging McRobbies critique, turning his attention to the question of
economic segregation in high-achieving creativity centersa political gesture that I might call watching
how the wind blows. With creative class (and allied finance sector) promotion and development having
engendered greater urban divides between rich and poor, between a highly educated, well-enfranchised
group of knowledge workers and allied finance sector traders, a sometimes-educated and growing group
of low-paid service workers, and a small and declining group of traditional working-class city dwellers,
Florida and colleagues (2015) have mapped economic segregation in cities with the goal of restoring city
centers as places of innovation, creativity, and economic progress (p. 78) and in turn restoring the
talent economies they advocate. By one argument, they are mapping the effects of policies they
vigorously promoted for two decades, with considerable gain to themselves. With McRobbies, our distrust
is earned.
For McRobbie, however, immiseration is not the only story. Like many critics devoted to cultural
possibility, she asks whether a democratic politics of social engagement can be shaped by and within
creative work in the present. For her most sustained example, she turns to the independent fashion sector
in Berlin, whose European social democratic tradition endures with more cultural and economic heft than
what remains in the UK and even (or especially) in London. London, like San Francisco, is driven by
finance and out-of-reach real estate prices despite the cultural democracy efforts and the contemporary
successes of the Greater London Council, which survived seven years into Thatchers regime but which
Thatcher closed down in 1986 (p. 63). In contrast to Michaels story or the world of creative sector
aspirants, whose status ambitions and sincere commitments are coupled with the very economic
stuckness they are attempting to leave behind, Berlins independent fashion scene is community oriented,
articulated to community-based worker training (in sewing and design), and often collectively organized.
Although Berlin is an international city, its fashion sector is outside the New YorkParisLondonMilan
fashion industrial complex. In Berlin, independent fashion workers have cultivated both art and craft
approaches. Berlin designers and shops are no less passionate than their London counterparts about their
work, but they are less imbued with the highly individualized logic of passionate work (chapter 4) that
roots especially women designers in their state of precarity. In Berlin, by contrast, modest state
subventions are available for independent fashion development.
Fashion art in Berlin struggles to assert an identity between two poles of German fashion
culture: elite consumption and mass production. A fashion art disposition is imported, says McRobbie,

4170 Lisa Henderson

International Journal of Communication 10(2016), Book Review

from art schools in the United States and the UK (p. 134), and articulated to subcultural value and the
identity of young people. Their designs are presented as pieces and their design statements are inflected
by art theory, philosophy, architecture, and cultural studies (p. 135). Even the well-known designers
McRobbie interviewed were reconciled to low pay under the mantle of art-making, and only cautiously
approach the prospect of partnership with international brandsa common ambition in London. In the art
sector, fashion design is about the work itself, not, first, about capital development.
Fashion craft, in contrast, is attuned to the Berlin neighborhoods where its small collectives
assemble and imagine their work to be part of neighborhood ecologies. Shop-front studios are places
where people draw, cut, and sew alongside rails of garments priced to be locally affordable and often sold
at weekend market stalls (p. 138). As fashion social enterprises (chapter 5), they emphasize teaching
and learning, egalitarian management, a commitment to ethical issues in fashion and textile production,
and a strong relationship to neighborhood women and girls (including immigrants) who might have an
interest in sewing and fashion. Even with subsidies, the pay is low and the life insecure, but the production
of local value separate from fashion itselfviable commerce, neighborhood integration, solidaritycreates
a very different context for living than the anxiety of thwarted rise experienced by aspiring fashion
workers in London.
My sketch of the artcraft distinction in Berlin might lead readers to wonder whether McRobbie
brings left and feminist nostalgia to Berlin independent fashion. Her research there is deeply rooted in the
work, lives, and sensibilities of particular designers and fashion collectivespeople and formations with
whom she has consulted for years. Indeed Fashion Matters Berlin (chapter 5) is her most research-rich
chapter, where others rely on a wealth of secondary sources and McRobbies earlier research in London
fashion (e.g., McRobbie, 1998). Her method is partly documentary and partly ethnographic, layered
enough to convince this reader that while the worlds of labor-reform London and contemporary Berlin
overlap, the differences are real. So is the nostalgia, which can have defeating but also critical outcomes,
where legacy strategies are articulated to new conditions.
McRobbies questionCan creative economies be repoliticized in radical ways?is urgent, and is
indeed born of left feminist tradition. McRobbie looks for openings where she can find them, places where
she and like-minded others can enact hairline politics, drawing possibility from places of fracturefrom
the lines of flight one generation takes away from their parents shop-floor lives, while still holding in
mind and body a trace of the solidarity ethos of unionized work; from new convergences between middleand working-class precarity in economies that push the top and bottom ever further away from each other
and those at the bottom closer together; from the slowed-down disposition of all work as craft that
Richard Sennett (2008) promotes in the spirit of a good job well done, a sensibility McRobbie adapts
(chapter 6); in Sennetts and McRobbies program of downgrading exceptional work and seeing it
alongside other kinds of jobs (McRobbie, p. 149); and, finally, encouraging artists to engage with their
communities (p. 163). These are practical challenges. I recognize in McRobbies questions a scholars
desire to rehistoricize activism of all kinds and take some political cues from past activists, translating, for
example, a feminist critique of labor into more collectivized labor practices in the present, such as those in
Berlin, which speak to migrant labor and global living. In the London case, however, the Brexit effect
(which McRobbie could not have predicted) remains to be seen, as conservative news discourses promote

International Journal of Communication 10(2016), Book Review

Lisa Henderson 4171

isolationism (Lewis, 2016), artists and constituencies lament the leave vote in economic and cultural
terms (Prebble et al., 2016) and young Brits, who came of age as members of the European Union,
imagine themselves through broadly European frameworks. A majority of young Brexit voters favored
remain. Young people eligible to vote, however, turned out in strikingly smaller proportions than their
older counterparts (Parkinson, 2016).
McRobbies account is not a systematic critique of UK policy in the period that concerns her (for
that I recommend the 2015 Hesmondhalgh et al. report). Her critical commitment to overdetermination,
moreover, sometimes takes the written form of multiple and simultaneous inputs, which demand that
readers arrive ready to focus, and which sweep through broad claims alongside delicate unearthings
combinations that can trouble the arc of her analysis. But we need McRobbies projectto make visible the
harsh terms of neoliberal labor reform in the name of creativity, and to rearticulate cultural production to
cultural democracy rather than the vast and hierarchal economy of creative competition. Generationally
speaking, neither McRobbie nor I will be the ones to make the new movements, but we have a role to play
in the rehistoricization she advocates and that newcomers such as Michael might embody, at least in part,
through their education. In the right spirit of empathy with new creative workers, be creative can be a
different and more generous incitement, and we have McRobbie to thank for leading by example.

References
Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class: And how its transforming work, community, and
everyday life. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Florida, R., & Mellander, C. (2015). Segregated city: The geography of economic segregation in
Americas metros. Toronto, Canada: Martin Prosperity Institute, Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto. Retrieved from http://martinprosperity.org/media/Segregated%20City.pdf
Hesmondhalgh, D., Oakley, K., Lee, D., & Nesbitt, M. (2015). Culture, economy and politics: The case of
New Labour. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lewis, J. (2016, June 24). How the U.K. press woke up to Brexit with that morning-after feeling. The
Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/how-the-uk-press-woke-up-to-brexitwith-that-morning-after-feeling-61605#comment_1010266
McRobbie, A. (1998). British fashion design: Rag trade or image industry? London, UK: Routledge.
Neff, G. (2012). Venture labor: Work and the burden of risk in innovative industries. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

4172 Lisa Henderson

International Journal of Communication 10(2016), Book Review

Parkinson, H. J. (2016, June 28). Young people are so bad at voting: Im disappointed in my peers. The
Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/28/youngpeople-bad-voting-millennials-eu-vote-politics
Prebble, L., Kapoor, A., Hough, S., Rutter, B., Lan, D., Norris, R., . . . van Hove, I. (2016, June 24). Arts
hit back at Brexit: I feel nothing but rage. The Guardian. Retrieved from
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/jun/24/arts-hit-back-at-brexit-i-feel-nothing-butrage